With a nervy, stuttering style, Ken Goodwin, who has died aged 78 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was a stand-up comedian who told jokes of the schoolboy variety and implored his appreciative audiences to "settle down, now". He soared to television fame in 1971 as one of the original solo acts in The Comedians, the ITV show with stand-up comics' routines edited so that they were each seen telling single gags in quick succession.

A typical Goodwin joke would run: "I got on the bus in Manchester the other day and I said to the conductor, 'Do you stop at the Imperial?' He said, 'What – on my money?'" The punchline would be delivered almost apologetically. Another of his catchphrases was: "I'm too good for this place." His style was at the safe, family end of the spectrum and contrasted markedly with the racist and sexist stereotypes of Bernard Manning's material. Frank Carson's irreverent humour lay somewhere in between.

"I don't know how I've got the nerve to tell terrible jokes like I do, but it works," Goodwin told the journalist Anthony Davis. "It's all in the character, the way I tell the jokes. I'm just Simple Simon. I come over all nervous and shy, and most of the audience is laughing at me before I've said a word." Although The Comedians ran for 15 years – disappearing with the arrival of "alternative" comedy, but revived briefly in 1992 – Goodwin left after the 1973 series.

A year later, his first wife, Pat Earith, whom he married in 1956, fell ill and he abandoned his career. He cared for her until her death in 1977. The timidity and lack of confidence that were a hallmark of his act were rooted in a lifelong string of such emotional upsets.

Born in Manchester, where his father was a stoker, Goodwin was dressed with secondhand clothes from a local church. While he was still a child, his mother walked out on the family – an experience he blamed for his insecurity and shyness. "I can't imagine anyone leaving a man and his children," Goodwin told the Glasgow Herald eight years ago. He was 15 when his father died from cancer.

Idolising the ukulele-playing music-hall comedian George Formby, the young Goodwin taught himself to master the instrument. He performed an act of comedy and songs in clubs while working by day successively as a coalman, a travelling sales representative, a mill worker and a market gardener. He stuck to telling gags after one of his hands was crushed by a falling crossbar while he was putting up goalposts in a Manchester park. Pat – who came up with his "settle down, now" catchphrase – suggested he perform in a talent contest in Leek, Staffordshire. He won the £100 first prize and turned professional, with some of his jokes borrowed from his two daughters.

After a long slog on the club circuit in the north of England, Goodwin had an opportunity to impress national audiences in the television talent show Opportunity Knocks! However, it was after the Granada Television producer Johnnie Hamp saw him performing at a club in Chester that he won his big break in The Comedians. "His jokes were like something out of the Dandy or Beano," recalled Hamp. "He would laugh at people laughing at his jokes." Suddenly, Goodwin was a celebrity, earning £5,000 a week, and appeared in the 1971 and 1972 Royal Variety Performances as well as his own television special, It's Ken Goodwin (1971). He was even featured in a Look-in magazine comic strip, Settle Down Now, It's Ken Goodwin.

Following Pat's death, he revived his career in television entertainment shows and theatres around Britain, performing at the London Palladium and in summer seasons and pantomimes. In 1993 he was reunited with some of his fellow comics on television in The Comedians Christmas Cracker – a year after undergoing surgery for cancer.

Having bought a villa in Alicante at the height of his career, Goodwin retired to Spain with his second wife, Vicki Lane, a singer and dancer, before moving to Llandudno, Wales, in 2008. She and his daughters survive him.